Your Purpose as a Blogger

You may at first think your purpose as a blogger is to make money. It’s not. That’s just a byproduct of your purpose. Your real purpose as an authority blogger is to create relationships with your readers and other bloggers.

This is sometimes where people realize they are not cut out to be bloggers.

And that’s ok. If you find this to be the case you may want to think about creating niche sites or product based squidoo sites.

Blogging is at is very base a social endeavor. You need to create relationships as a blogger to have a really successful blog.

Relationships with your readers:

When you create a relationship with your reader they feel like they know you. They feel like you are talking to them when you write your posts. They identify with your content.

When this happens it’s more like you’ve got a friend than a reader. It’s much easier to take a recommendation from a friend than a stranger. Think about this. When is the last time you saw/heard a commercial for a new product ~ be it a workout video, a book, a kitchen gadget ~ doesn’t matter. Do you run out and buy it based on the commercial?

If it’s a kitchen gadget I sure may be tempted lol… however… if I have a friend say “oh I got this thing and it’s awesome/works great/helped me lose weight… whatever. I’m much more likely to actually go buy this thing (especially if I already had the itch). This holds true for this segment we have on one of our news programs each Wednesday. It’s called “Does it work Wednesday”. Every week they choose a product (usually sold on tv) and test it out. They then tell you if it worked or if it didn’t. You get to see a bit of the people trying it etc. I trust this segment and have made purchases based on their opinion of whether it worked or not. NOT from an infomercial, but from people who I trust are telling me the truth about the product!!

Anyway… all I’m saying is you need to create relationships, get to know your readers.

Relationships with other bloggers:

These relationships are really important because having allies and friends is huge in the blogging world. One email mention from someone that has a big list and a big following can change your entire business.  No one is going to mention you on their list if they don’t know you.

I’ll tell you right now that just emailing people and asking them to promote/mention/whatever for you is not going to work unless they know who you are and like you.

Creating relationships with bloggers creates opportunities for joint ventures, for guest blogging spots, for ad swaps… the list goes on. But you can’t do any of those things without first creating a relationship with some bloggers in your niche.

How to create and nurture blogging relationships:

With readers:

This one’s pretty simple. Create excellent pillar content regularly and consistently. People will learn they can trust you to have new content and they’ll keep coming back. If it’s content they find valuable/helpful/uplifting ~ whatever your niche is, they will not only keep coming back, they will tell other people about it as well.

Ask for comments. Start a conversation. Then participate. Answer your comments ~ ALWAYS. Someone has gone to the trouble to create a conversation on your blog, answer. Simple as that. Your comment replies are one of the biggest assets you have to creating and nuturing a relationship with your readers.

With other bloggers:

Reading and commenting on their blogs are the best ways to begin a relationship.

Send an email. This is after you’ve been commenting for a while and they are probably familiar with your name. Send them an email. Don’t ask them for anything, or try to get anything from them. Just make personal contact. Tell them what you love about their blog. Thank them for the regular/consistent/fantastic content. Tell them a story about what you learned/were able to do/helped by their posts. (WE love that a lot, us bloggers!!) They will remember you if you do this.

Tweet their stuff. A great way to create relationships and nuture them is to post other people’s posts to twitter or facebook. If you use the @theirusername they will know you did it. They will remember you if you do it regularly. (and chances are they will start retweeting you too ~ which is a benefit to you)

This week let’s create some relationships!

1. Keep publishing your posts. 3 this week. That will be a goal every week. If  you’re having trouble with content make sure you go back and read the content creation series I did. That should give you plenty of content ideas. You can also grab Yaro Starak’s free ebook Blog Profit Blueprint. He goes over some excellent ideas for creating content (as well as getting traffic)

2. Start making blog comments on related blogs. I would suggest you find 10 or so blogs in your niche or a related/relevant niche. Make sure these blogs post regularly. Add them to your RSS reader/page and visit them regularly. Read the post and then comment.

To make this a double whammy of productivity find blogs in your niche that use the commentluv or keywordluv plugin. That way you will get not only a link to your homepage, but an anchor text link as well. Here’s a great way to find commentluv blogs on your topic. You can also go to google and put a keword you’re looking for and the word commentluv in the search box and see what comes up. I just found a couple decent ones testing that out.

Getting this piece organized can be tricky, but once you get it down it will be quick as lightening to get through this promotional piece of your day.

Here’s what I do.

1. I search around and when I find a blog that

• posts regularly
• uses commentluv

2. Add them to my Igoogle page

Anyone can create an igoogle page. It’s just a customized google homepage. You’ll have to have a gmail address to get started ~ but they’re free so grab one if you don’t have one.

You’ll need to sign into your account. Then when you go to www.google.com you can choose igoogle. You can set it as your default homepage so it always opens to that page when you enter google.com.

Once you’ve got your homepage up you can begin to add blogs to it. It’s really simple. Watch how I do it in this video:

For the non video folks:

Find a blog you like.

Click the orange RSS icon.

Choose google from the list of options that come up.

Choose google homepage from the two options that come up.

Bam… you’re done. It will be on your customized google homepage.

I like to do it this way because I personally like to go to other people’s blogs to see what’s going on and to comment. I like to organize my homepage so all the blogs I have with commentluv on 1 topic are all in one column. (You can move your RSS boxes around by just dragging them and dropping them where you want them to go).

I have 3 columns on my page. 1 for IM blogs. 1 for topics related to  my balance blog that aren’t using commentluv or keywordluv and the 3rd column is for all the balance related blogs that are using those plugins.

I can easily see when new posts are up that I haven’t read ~ they will not be highlighted on my homepage. I can go read the post, and comment very quickly. I have about 25 blogs in the 3rd column right now and I probably spend from 45 minutes to an hour a day reading and commenting on blogs (as well as finding new ones to engage with).

Don’t forget to tweet the post (use su.pr if you’ve got it installed so you can schedule the tweets through the day)

Next time we’re going to look even closer at how to find great blogs to create relationships with, so stay tuned. If you have any questions/issues please feel free to ask in the comment section.